This ain't your childhood rock collection: Check out the cosmic debris that could auction for $4.8 million

This piece, perhaps the most aesthetically complex iron meteorite ever discovered, was found near Gibeon, Namibia.

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Mark Mauthner/Christie's

Extraterrestrial olivine crystals dot the Chilean meteorite on the left, while the cavities on the rock on the right echo Edvard Munch's most famous painting.

More than a hundred meteorites ranging in weight from a few ounces to at least a half-ton will soon conclude their journey from the distant reaches of the solar system to the mainstream of the collectibles universe. On April 20, Christie’s will hold its first live auction devoted exclusively to the extraterrestrial objects. The London event marks what may be just a small step for the auction house but a giant leap for New York’s leading meteorite dealer, Darryl Pitt. A former photographer for Rolling Stone and the owner of a jazz artists’ management agency, he has been one of a tight-knit band of proselytizers who over the years have helped the onetime shooting stars reach an audience beyond meteorite hunters, hobbyists, scientists and museums.

Working from his agency’s office above Times Square, Pitt, 60, has been particularly persuasive regarding the aesthetic value of meteorites. And through auctions and interviews, he has conveyed to newcomers the fascination inherent in objects that are among the oldest in the solar system and the rarest on Earth.

It’s partly thanks to those efforts that meteorites have worked their way up the auction-house ladder—from a component of natural-history sales that include fossils and gems, to a starring role in the high-end international market.

Mark Mauthner/Christie's

ONE DIRECTION: This meteorite found in Russia didn't tumble during its descent to Earth, creating a rare and pleasing formation of flow lines.

"To have the largest auction house in the world acknowledging the importance of meteorites is a big deal,” Pitt said.

Demonstrating the power the objects can have over the uninitiated, he handed a visitor a chunk of nondescript gray rock marked with white spots. “That’s the oldest matter that mankind can ever touch,” Pitt said, pointing to the flecks of compacted nebular dust or “CAIs”—calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, which are about 4.6 billion years old. The rock itself was an Allende meteorite, a much-studied variety from a shower that fell in northern Mexico in 1969.

Though he trades with museums and has been credited on research papers for Eureka-moment discoveries that he has passed along to scientists, Pitt has a business interest in promoting meteorites. Some specimens from his private, 650-piece Macovich Collection of Meteorites will be centerpieces in the Christie’s sale. (“Macovich” is Russian for “son of Mack,” referring to Pitt’s late father.)

From private dealing to public offerings

Those specimens are expected to fetch substantially higher prices than his offerings did at the first auction for meteorites, at Phillips in New York way back in 1995. That sale attracted news organizations from around the world, according to Pitt, who curated the selection. The auction’s 300 lots, which included fossils and gems, brought in $300,000.

“I wanted to expand the tent,” he said. “I realized public offerings—auctions—were a great way to do that.”

Christie’s first ventured into meteorites with two online auctions, one in 2014 and the next a year later, both organized by James Hyslop, the London-based head of its natural-history department.

Is this stone from outer space?

There are basic ways to tell if a rock might be a meteorite, starting with how different it looks from what’s around it. That’s one reason a meteorite trade has flourished in the rocky desert regions of northwestern Africa, where nomads can pick the extraterrestrial objects out of the landscape.

Moroccan traders who want to know exactly what they have might then FedEx a tiny piece of rock to a lab and pay a nominal fee for an initial screening. The researcher will often look for a shiny “fusion crust,” which would have formed as the outside of the meteoroid melted during atmospheric entry.

Next come observations with a high-powered microscope and mineral analyses using an electron microprobe. The most obvious sign of a meteorite for the vast majority of specimens: They contain “tiny specks of iron metal,” said Tony Irving, a leading meteorite expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. By contrast, rocks from Earth and Mars contain iron oxide.

For an official classification in the Meteoritical Society Bulletin, collectors pay for a deeper study and donate 20 grams of the sample to an approved institution for archiving and research. That exam yields a chemical analysis and a sense of how unique the sample might be.

A geochemistry Ph.D., Irving worked on Apollo moon samples but moved into meteoritics 15 years ago. Now specializing in rare Martian meteorites, he recently confirmed discovery of a new one: There are now a total of 94 “unpaired” Martian stones (that is, not pieces of another meteorite).

Though meteorite hunters have occasionally run afoul of the authorities—and some countries, including his native Australia, have restricted meteorite sales—Irving says that the collectibles market has been a boon to science.

“We’re only beginning to find out about the solar system,” he said. “Without people like Darryl [Pitt] and Scott [Perekslis] (see main story), the Moroccans wouldn’t have any business, we wouldn’t find as many meteorites, and scientists wouldn’t have samples to work on.”

A grander event than the online sales, the live auction includes a printed catalogue, four days of public viewing and a high-profile selection that has helped drive the pre-sale estimate to $3 million to $4.8 million for the 83 lots. (The first online auction, which was the larger of the two, took in $634,000.)

The seven-figure estimate also reflects the overall increase in the value of meteorites as the collecting field has grown. “Some meteorites have increased 1,500% over the past 10 to 15 years,” said Geoff Notkin, an author and dealer who co-hosted the series Meteorite Men, which ran on Discovery’s Science Channel for three seasons starting in 2009.

Prices rising for fallen objects

Other meteorites have appreciated a lot more than that. In 1998, a Gibeon iron meteorite—discovered near the Namibian town of that name and famed for its aesthetic qualities—fetched about $50 per kilogram. Recently, Notkin saw samples from the same meteorite at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, the world’s biggest gathering for meteorite dealers, going for $1,500 per kilogram.

DATA POINTS

2,900% Increase in the price of rare Gibeon iron meteorites from Namibia, since 1998

4.6B years Age of the oldest matter in the solar system

$300K Sales total from the first-ever meteorite auction, at Phillips in 1995

$3M+ Pre-sales estimate for Christie’s April 20 auction in London

Notkin says the global networks created by the web, along with auctions, have helped turn the science of meteoritics from an arcane subject into a popular one (he also cites the impact of his television show). And he credits Pitt, a friend and former colleague, with persuading collectors to look at certain meteorites as “natural works of art.”

That has helped make the objects appealing to auction houses and attracted the elite buyers necessary for a high-end sale. “There’s a very small number of collectors willing to spend $100,000 on a meteorite,” Notkin said.

A range of factors contribute to pricing: the history surrounding a meteorite’s fall or discovery; the rarity of certain types, such as Martian and lunar stones, which are blasted into space by asteroids colliding with the Red Planet or the moon; scientific value; and aesthetic qualities.

Some samples combine beauty and history, such as the one featured on the Christie’s catalogue cover: a two-pound stone just four and a half inches wide that was part of the shower that followed a massive meteoroid explosion over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013.

Pitt acquired the rock for his Macovich Collection through an exchange with the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow later that year. Prized for its aerodynamic parabolic shape—the result of staying oriented, rather than tumbling, as it fell to Earth—the object has a pre-sale estimate of $280,000 to $450,000.

According to Hyslop, who is overseeing the sale, the market has also been fueled by a new breed of collector: people who used to confine their auction purchases to fine jewelry or paintings and who are always on the lookout for the very best examples. Finding masterpieces in more traditional categories has become harder.“

Some of the best meteorites are still available and in private hands, which appeals to that masterpiece buyer,” Hyslop said.

Prices don't always go up, however. Various factors in the past couple of years, starting with some big finds of lunar meteorites, have driven their price down to as low as $300 per gram from highs of several thousand dollars, according to Pitt. (The objects are still extremely rare, and the prices are starting to go back up, he said.)

And the Christie's live auction may not herald a new era in meteorite sales at the major houses.

Niche market

The auction “sends a good signal,” said Craig Kissick, director of the nature and science section of Heritage Auctions, which held a record $1 million sale of meteorites in New York in 2012, with Pitt as consultant. “But meteorites are never going to be more than an asterisk on [Christie’s] bottom line,” Kissick added.

Christie’s had $7.4 billion in sales last year. The live auction is likely to do more for the meteorite market than it will for the auction house.

Scott Perekslis, managing partner at Manhattan-based private-equity firm Bregal Partners, had never thought of collecting meteorites until he read an article about the Heritage auction in 2012 and toured the selection in the days leading up to it.

“I’d never conceived this kind of thing would be available to private owners,” he recalled in his midtown office as he set out specimens from the collection he has built over the past four years.

They included slices of pallasite—valued for its greenish-yellow crystals that look like stained glass set into an iron-nickel matrix—and lunar and Martian meteorites. “It’s magical to hold a piece of something you see in the night sky,” Perekslis said.

He has bought objects at auction, at the Tucson Gem Show, from Pitt and from traders in Morocco. One of his Martian rocks turned out to be 2.4 billion years old, and is one of only two known specimens from that period.

Perekslis declined to put a value on his collection. But he is keeping a close eye on the Christie’s sale.

“I’ll be watching this,” he said. “A live auction will bring in people who never thought of meteorites as collectibles before.”

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